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Friday, 11 January 2008

The Passing of A Giant: Sir Edmund Hillary

This is not a posting about cycling but about the death yesterday of an extraordinary person whom I admired deeply. Sir Edmund Hillary is most famous for the conquest of Everest with Tenzing Norgay as part of the Hunt Expedition of 1953, but in fact his accomplishments are far greater.

In 2003, when I was living in Washington, DC, I visited Explorer's Hall at the National Geographic Society. There was a wonderful exhibition marking the 50th anniversary of the climbing of Mt. Everest, with models of the landscape showing the route the expedition took, and including the equipment, primitive to our eyes, that the climbers used. The history of the expedition is fascinating, but what was also interesting was the part of the exhibition showing how the Sherpas live. There was even a cut-away house and videos showing how they cooked and worked the land. Sir Edmund was deeply involved in efforts to assist the people of Nepal and the small charity he founded built schools and carried out other worthwhile projects there. He also was a keen conservationist and spearheaded a movement to clean up Nepal, littered as it was with all the equipment from climbing expeditions.

He was apparently an extremely modest person but reading the obituary prepared by the Associated Press below it is clear that his achievements were anything but modest. In a world where almost anyone can be described as a "hero" and where "role models" often have feet of clay, here is an example of a life well-lived by a man who did the Right Thing.

He deserves the State Funeral he will receive in New Zealand. Rest in peace, Sir Ed!

The gangling New Zealander devoted much of his life to aiding the mountain people of Nepal and took his fame in stride, preferring to be called “Ed” and considering himself just an ordinary beekeeper.

“Sir Ed described himself as an average New Zealander with modest abilities. In reality, he was a colossus. He was an heroic figure who not only ‘knocked off' Everest but lived a life of determination, humility, and generosity,” Ms. Clark said in a statement. “The legendary mountaineer, adventurer, and philanthropist is the best-known New Zealander ever to have lived,” she said.Sir Edmond's life was marked by grand achievements, high adventure, discovery, excitement — and by his personal humility. Humble to the point that he only admitted being the first man atop Everest long after the death of climbing companion Tenzing Norgay.He had pride in his feats. Returning to base camp as the man who took the first step onto the top of the world's highest peak, he declared: “We knocked the bastard off.”

The accomplishment as part of a British climbing expedition even added lustre to the coronation of Queen Elizabeth four days later, and she knighted Sir Edmond as one of her first acts.But he was more proud of his decades-long campaign to set up schools and health clinics in Nepal, the homeland of Tenzing Norgay, the mountain guide with whom he stood arm in arm on the summit of Everest on May 29, 1953.

He wrote of the pair's final steps to the top of the world: “Another few weary steps and there was nothing above us but the sky. There was no false cornice, no final pinnacle. We were standing together on the summit. There was enough space for about six people. We had conquered Everest.

“Awe, wonder, humility, pride, exaltation — these surely ought to be the confused emotions of the first men to stand on the highest peak on Earth, after so many others had failed,” Sir Edmond noted.

“But my dominant reactions were relief and surprise. Relief because the long grind was over and the unattainable had been attained. And surprise, because it had happened to me, old Ed, the beekeeper, once the star pupil of the Tuakau District School, but no great shakes at Auckland Grammar (high school) and a no-hoper at university, first to the top of Everest. I just didn't believe it.

He said: “I removed my oxygen mask to take some pictures. It wasn't enough just to get to the top. We had to get back with the evidence. Fifteen minutes later we began the descent.”His philosophy of life was simple: “Adventuring can be for the ordinary person with ordinary qualities, such as I regard myself,” he said in a 1975 interview after writing his autobiography, “Nothing Venture, Nothing Win.”

Close friends described him as having unbounded enthusiasm for both life and adventure.“We all have dreams — but Ed has dreams, then he's got this incredible drive, and goes ahead and does it,” long-time friend Jim Wilson said in 1993.

Sir Edmond summarized it for schoolchildren in 1998, when he said one didn't have to be a genius to do well in life.

“I think it all comes down to motivation. If you really want to do something, you will work hard for it,” he said before planting some endangered Himalayan oaks in the school grounds.The planting was part of his program to reforest upland areas of Nepal.Sir Edmond remains the only non-political person outside Britain honoured as a member of the Britain's Order of the Garter, bestowed by Queen Elizabeth on just 24 knights and ladies living worldwide at any time.

Throughout his 88 years, he was always the atypical “typical New Zealander” who spoke his mind.

He recalled his surprise at the huge international interest in their feat. “I was a bit taken aback to tell you the truth. I was absolutely astonished that everyone should be so interested in us just climbing a mountain.”

Sir Edmond never forgot the small mountainous country that propelled him to worldwide fame. He revisited Nepal constantly over the next 54 years.

Without fanfare and without compensation, Sir Edmond spent decades pouring energy and resources from his own fund-raising efforts into Nepal through the Himalayan Trust he founded in 1962.

Known as “burra sahib” — “big man,” for his 6 feet 2 inches — by the Nepalese, Sir Edmond funded and helped build hospitals, health clinics, airfields and schools.He raised funds for higher education for Sherpa families, and helped set up reforestation programs in the impoverished country. About $250,000 a year was raised by the charity for projects in Nepal.

A strong conservationist, he demanded that international mountaineers clean up thousands of tons of discarded oxygen bottles, food containers and other climbing debris that litter the lower slopes of Everest.

His commitment to Nepal took him back more than 120 times. His adventurer son Peter has described his father's humanitarian work there as “his duty” to those who had helped him.It was on a visit to Nepal that his first wife, Louise, 43, and 16-year-old daughter Belinda died in a light plane crash March 31, 1975.

Sir Edmond remarried in 1990, to June Mulgrew, former wife of adventurer colleague and close friend Peter Mulgrew, who died in a passenger plane crash in the Antarctic. He is survived by his wife and children Peter and Sarah.

His passport described Sir Edmond as an “author-lecturer,” and by age 40 his schedule of lecturing and writing meant he had to give up beekeeping “because I was too busy.”By that time he was touring, lecturing and fund-raising for the Himalayan Trust in the United States and Europe for three months at a time, speaking at more than 100 venues during a tour.He was known as ready to take risks to achieve his goals, but always had control so that nobody ever died on a Sir Edmond-led expedition.

He was at times controversial. He decried what he considered a lack of “honest-to-God morality” in New Zealand politics in the 1960s, and he refused to backtrack when the prime minister demanded he withdraw the comments. Ordinary New Zealanders applauded his integrity.

He got into hot water over what became known as his “dash to the Pole” in the 1957-58 Antarctic summer season aboard modified farm tractors while part of a joint British-New Zealand expedition.

Sir Edmond disregarded instructions from the Briton leading the expedition and guided his tractor team up the then-untraversed Shelton Glacier, pioneering a new route to the polar plateau and the South Pole.

In 2006 he climbed into a row over the death of Everest climber David Sharp, stating it was “horrifying” that climbers could leave a dying man after an expedition left the Briton to die high on the upper slopes.

Sir Edmond said he would have abandoned his own pioneering 1953 climb to save another life.“It was wrong if there was a man suffering altitude problems and was huddled under a rock, just to lift your hat, say 'good morning' and pass on by,” he said. “Human life is far more important than just getting to the top of a mountain.”

Named New Zealand's ambassador to India in the mid-1980s, Sir Edmond was the celebrity of the New Delhi cocktail circuit. He later said he found the job confining.He introduced jetboats to many Ganges River dwellers a decade earlier, in 1977, when his “Ocean to the Sky” expedition travelled the Ganges by jetboat to within 200 kilometres of its source.

The last segment was by foot, and two mountain peaks near Badranath, where the Ganges rises, were also climbed.

Sir Edmond didn't place himself among top mountaineers. “I don't regard myself as a cracking good climber. I'm just strong in the back. I have a lot of enthusiasm and I'm good on ice,” he said.

Despite his fame, he spoke of being “really embarrassed” even when introduced at a lecture.“I really am an ordinary person with a few abilities which I've tried to use in the best way I can,” he said.

Honoured by the United Nations as one of its Global 500 conservationists in 1987, he was also awarded numerous honorary doctorates from universities in several parts of the world.Throughout his life Sir Edmond remembered his first mountain he climbed, the 2,930-metre Mount Tapuaenuku — “Tappy” as he called it — in Marlborough on New Zealand's South Island. He scaled it solo over three days in 1944, while in training camp with the Royal New Zealand Air Force during the Second World War. “Tapuaenuku” in Maori means “footsteps of the Rainbow God”.

“I'd climbed a decent mountain at last,” he said later.

Like all good mountaineers before him, Sir Edmond had no special insight into that quintessential question: Why climb?

“I can't give you any fresh answers to why a man climbs mountains. The majority still go just to climb them.”

I especially like Hillary's quote... "Adventuring can be for the ordinary person with ordinary qualities.." He really was an incredible man. I also have enjoyed Jamling Norgay's accounts and tribute to his father's climb with Hillary. I own the IMAX DVD of his summit with David Brashears... I've watched it many times.

Your Humble Wheelman

After I cycled from London to Munich at 18 years of age, I decided I always wanted cycling to be a part of my life. It is a pastime that lets you get fit, see the world at your own pace, enjoy exotic machinery and make new friends.
You can contact me at l_reissner@hotmail.com